WP Caregiver: 30+ WordPress Tweaks in 1 Convenient Plugin

WP Caregiver is a hidden gem of a plugin that arrived in the WordPress repository nearly six months ago. The plugin was recently featured on Tidy Repo, a site dedicated to testing and curating WordPress plugins. Surprisingly, it has only received a handful of downloads, though it has the potential to replace multiple plugins that you may already have in place to handle small WordPress tweaks.

WP Caregiver is essentially a long list of light switches for core WordPress features and functions. It provides an organized way to turn these on or off at will and is separated into three tabbed categories: Frontend Features, Backend Features and System Information.

System Information

System Information lets you quickly view your server time, memory usage and SQL queries. It also gives you a quick and easy way to delete all of your post revisions and calculate the disc usage for your site.

Frontend Features

The Frontend tweaks include the ability to easily remove a bunch of extras that many WordPress users don’t use, such as post relational links, website URL field in the comment form, the admin bar, and more. This screen also contains the ability to quickly enable the Open Graph tags generator. One really useful feature is the option to easily enable “Quick Maintenance Mode” with a checkbox. No need to install a separate plugin for creating a maintenance page.

Backend Features

Backend tweaks include the ability to turn off update notifications, hide login error messages, enable excerpt field for pages, enable TinyMCE Editor for excerpt, enable categories for pages and many more handy little changes. The ability to customize the WordPress mail name and address from this screen is a convenient little addition.

WordPress was made to be customized. Removing extras in the core features can help to make your custom WordPress installation leaner. The 30+ options offered in WP Caregiver cover many of the most commonly applied WordPress tweaks. Many thanks to the folks at Blint Design for putting this handy collection of tweaks into one convenient plugin. Download WP Caregiver for free from the WordPress plugin repository.

Don’t like it either.
Tried the plugin, maintenance mode option, fortunately on a local server as I immediately got logged out and could not log-in again as it was in maintenance mode!
Thank goodness I did not try it on a live site as making manual changes to the database is not my idea of fun.
After that experience I think that even though you recommend the plugin, I will bow out of using it

@Wim: take in account that localhost WordPress installs use to behave not so equally than live sites. Anyway, Maintanance Mode is automagically enabled by WP anytime you upgrade anything (WP, plugins, themes)…. so don’t bother about that feature ;)

@Marcello -> You obviously do not get it!
1 feature tried, 1 feature failed. That does not spell good as a rule, sorry I picked that specific setting to try!
Moreover, nearly all items listed I would prefer to have in a theme, no need for outside support.
Are there actually people who do not know that WP sets your site to maintenance mode when you upgrade a theme or plugin? The feature to disable notification for those I believe is a bit nonsensical as that thwarts a lot of security for the future of the site.

I know you’re right, but if you read my first comment will see that you get a lot more control with any of the plugins I mentioned rather than this one.

And regarding your last question, OH YES, there are LOTS of people who actually is completely unaware of what’s going on internally or even in the frontend when they click on the upgrade buttons. I host several WP sites and may tell that roughly the 60% of owners with admin rights don’t know -and even don’t care!- what makes WP work.

That’s why these kind of plugins are showcasing a lot of options to magically administer those, well hidden, black magic for some people, internal settings.

And obviously, that people surely won’t be reading these kind of blogs & information.